


Held Me Spellbound in the Night

by orphan_account



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Comforting Dean Winchester, Dean Winchester Takes Care of Sam Winchester, Episode Tag, Episode: s15e03 The Rupture, Established Relationship, F/M, Free Will, Grieving Sam Winchester, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Open Relationships, Sam Winchester's Terrible Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 12:47:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21179660
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Coda toThe Rupture, (15x03). After everything that happened in the crypt. AfterRowena— Sam's just not sure which is worse. That he regrets all the metaphorical and literal blood on his hands, or that he doesn't.





	Held Me Spellbound in the Night

Sam doesn’t say anything else for a long time, head hung, staring at his own bare feet. Still mostly in a fog. He doesn’t even remember where he’d put his boots. It couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes ago.

Dean’s quiet too, perched on the edge of his desk, hand wrapped sedately around his own wrist. Still here for him though, silent, as he watches him say nothing. As he lets his very presence bring Sam the only peace he deserves. His brother’s soft words of comfort still hanging in the safe, filtered air of his bedroom.

_“You didn’t have a choice.”_

Sam had weakly concurred. Mostly just to accept the kindness Dean was offering him. Appreciation more than agreement.

He _did _have a choice, though. That’s the thing. They always do. And isn’t that exactly what they’ve been fighting for?

Rowena’s face flashes through his mind again, mascara smudged wet beneath her beseeching eyes, that perfect lipstick, neat and pristine, even with her own blood coating the tips of her fingers. _“But will you let the world die—let your **brother **die—just so I can live?”_

Sam swallows hard. Curls his own fingers into a fist against his thigh. Just like he’d curled them around the hilt of that knife, the murder weapon. A question asked and an answer given:

_No. No, he wouldn’t._

“Sammy,” Dean tries again, slipping his hands from his lap to push himself slowly upright. “I mean it, man. There’s nothing else you coulda done.” He’s changed but hasn’t showered yet—another masking swipe of deodorant and a worn-in Henley, and Dean’s ready to drink and brood for the rest of the night. Until he drops from sheer lack of sleep. His own, personal form of self-punishment.

“I know,” Sam says again. _Lies _again. Just as unconvincing as the first time.

His brother finally steps over to the bed, crosses those last few feet of plausible deniability. Sam’s door is still cracked open—though it probably doesn’t matter at the moment, he guesses. He doubts Dean much cares what Cas would say or think if he were to stumble across them right now. Sam lets out a self-castigating exhale. As if the angel doesn’t already know everything they pretend he doesn’t. Dean’s stupid, unnecessary insistence on subterfuge.

Really though, who is _Sam _to judge other people’s self-destructive coping mechanisms?

_“Ah, **there’s **our fearless leader,” she’d said, arching her body against the wooden doorframe. The midnight blue of Rowena’s long dress sparkling faintly in the low light. Sam had hidden himself away in one of the bunker’s back archive rooms for a reason. The Apocalypse World hunters may have agreed to help where they could with the search for Michael—for **Dean**—but coordinating a small army of mostly-fledgling hunters was wearing on him, no matter what kind of brave face he’d tried to put on for the group. Sam hadn’t been sure if Rowena had intentionally sought him out or had just stumbled upon him though. It’s not like the obvious play for privacy would have mattered to her. “Look at you,” she’d tutted, stepping into the room without even a gesture of invitation, “in here by your lonesome, all peely-wally.”_

_Sam had rubbed a hand over his face. More exhausted about the possibility of going toe-to-toe with Rowena than bothering trying to keep her out. “I have no idea what that means,” he’d said tiredly. “And can you close the door?”_

_Rowena had blithely ignored him, of course. “It means like you look about three minutes from keeling over.” She’d paused at the edge of his jury-rigged research table. Given him one of those centuries’ deep looks from underneath her sharp eyelashes, an unnerving reminder of how old she really was. “It’s usually Dean’s job, isn’t it? Making sure you eat and sleep?” She’d reached out to trace a manicured finger over the line of his jaw, playful, more than anything else. “And **shave?**” A melodic, lilting hum had slipped out at the joke. Nearly as orchestrated as the rest of her carefully-applied makeup. “Though I’m fond of the beard, actually,” Rowena had purred, leaning in close, “it’s very masculine.”_

_Sam had let out a humorless chuckle in response, unsure whether the statement was supposed to be a compliment or a retroactive insult. Or both._

_“But who’s watching out for you now, poor dear?” she’d asked. Pity more than sympathy._

_He’d balked at her innocuous statement, the presumption of the endearment, his hand clenching into a fist over all his stupid, useless papers that hadn’t gotten him even one inch closer to finding Michael. “I don’t need—”_

_“Don’t you?” Rowena had breathed, all gentle, honest disbelief. Barely had let him get a word in and she hadn’t even raised her voice. “So much weight on those broad shoulders,” she’d said, skillfully kneading her fingers up and down his back. The first caring touch Sam had bothered to notice in nearly a month. The reflexive shiver that he’d tried so hard to smother. “Maybe someone just needs to help you release all that **tension**.”_

_“Rowena,” Sam had warned, at the very last tattered thread of his willpower, but she’d seemed to take it as encouragement. And hadn’t that been just like her?_

“Hey, Sammy,” Dean says firmly, crouching down between his legs to peer up at him. Resting a hand on the bend of his knee. Heavy and warm and _real_.

And Sam blinks the memories out of his eyes as his brother pulls him back into the present. “What?” he asks, tighter than he’d intended. His voice somehow too soft and too harsh at the same time.

Dean watches him for another moment, then lets out a deliberate breath. “Look,” he says gently, trying his hardest past his own hurt, “I know how rough this has gotta be for you.”

He nudges his own hand along the back of his older brother’s. Needing the skin contact. Any sliver of affection that Dean’s willing to offer.

_Do you, though?_

Sam remembers Madison. Remembers the deathly-cold vise around his heart, the crushing weight of knowing that he’d had no other choice then, too. _Except he had. _There’s always a choice. There are ways to cure a werewolf—and the ten years it took to figure that out still seem like an eternity to him, looking back on it, but they probably would have felt like nothing to her. If it would’ve meant the difference between life and death.

_Still_. Sam remembers seeing nothing but the back of her head as he’d stepped into that room, tears streaming down his own face. Not brave enough to face hers. Bringing his gun up and pulling the trigger before she’d had a chance to turn around. Quicker, more humane that way, he’d convinced himself. As he’d put an innocent woman down like a sick dog.

Sam swallows back bile. Lets his brother’s grounding touch remind him that he’s human, that he’s _loved_, even if he doesn’t deserve it.

But more than all the rest of it, he remembers walking back to find that Dean had cried for him. Even though he’d barely known her. A reaction borne solely from Sam’s own pain.

Dean isn’t crying right now, kneeling between his bent knees as he watches him with careful concern—but Sam’s own tears had stopped when his brother had knocked on his bedroom door. And they’re both so, _so _fucking tired.

“Rowena,” Dean says haltingly, “she really came through, in the end.” He grants him a fleeting smile, solely for Sam’s benefit. “Never woulda guessed it, from the way we first crossed paths, but people can surprise you.”

“Yeah,” Sam says, meaning something else entirely. “They really can.”

Dean huffs out a breath like he gets the joke anyway. “She wanted to do the right thing. Make the big, heroic sacrifice. And I’m grateful for it, but that’s not on you.”

_He’d eaten her out on the archive room table. All his useless fucking papers crinkling under each writhe and twist of her body._

_A mere whisper of Latin from her lips and the room’s antique lighting had fizzed and winked out, pitching them into the pure, soft blackness. None of the other hunters had even suspected they were in there. They’d been as protected as they could be, there in the dark. Even with the door still barely ajar._

_“Och,” Rowena had gasped softly, her expensive dress rucked up around her waist. Waterfall of red hair cascading off the edge of the scratched wood. Moaning deliciously whenever he’d ground his chin against the wet folds of her pussy. “Good boy.”_

_He’d grown even harder at the praise._

_She’d come on his tongue, and his teeth. His hands digging violent bruises into the milk-white flesh of her thighs._

“Yeah,” Sam says stiffly, “I guess you’re right.”

But Dean doesn’t take his weak platitude as permission to move on. He stays right where he is, gaze still fixed on him, with an expression far too insightful for what he isn’t supposed to know.

Sam had wondered idly, the past year, if Dean could tell that something had changed between him and Rowena. Or if Sam should’ve mentioned it himself. If keeping the secret was some profound violation of the spoken-unspoken _thing _he and Dean have. If maybe staying quiet about the specifics of those desperate, lonely weeks hunting down Michael counted as cheating, or if it was just an unimportant bit of detail that his brother didn’t particularly care to know about. He’d always leaned toward the latter, but to see Dean right now—looking up at Sam without a speck of judgment in his eyes—he can’t help but wonder if he had already known. Or at the very least, suspected.

If maybe he _always _knows what Sam isn’t strong enough to say out loud.

Dean glides his hand further up Sam’s thigh, then back down again. One broad sweep of his palm. Soothing. Like he’s calming a jittery horse. Sam’s not sure if he should be annoyed at the fact that it’s _working_, but his quirks his lips to the side anyway.

“I’m sorry about Rowena,” his brother says, low and gruff. “I really am.” It’s a simple enough statement, but he cuts his eyes down under the weight of it, the dark, sooty flare of his eyelashes casting shadows over his cheekbones. Maybe the stark honesty of it is harder to get out than the earlier banalities. He swallows, and Sam watches the bob of his throat, the silent tension in his arms stretching the seams of his Henley. “You okay with me as the consolation prize?”

Sam shakes his head softly. Reaches his own hand out to grip at the front of Dean’s shirt until he’ll meet his gaze again. “Don’t joke like that,” he says.

And Dean must see what he needs to in his eyes, because he lets out an exhale that flows through his entire upper body. He even tosses him a flicker of a smile, reaching down to uncurl Sam’s fingers before he wrinkles the gray-green cotton, then he ducks his head to press a relieved kiss to his knuckles.

Angry—Cas had called him, a lifetime ago. Always angry. But he’s so much more than that. Sometimes Sam thinks he might be the only person who gets to see his brother like this. Who knows this side of him. The _true _Dean, beneath all the jagged armor he puts on for the rest of the world.

Everyone else gets Dean’s battle cry. Sam gets his loving whisper.

He’s not sure how the rest of them manage to go on with such a cold, shell-thin piece of him.

“I wish,” Sam pauses, “I wish things could have gone differently.” He lets out a sharp breath of his own, too loud in the comparative silence. “But not if it meant you weren’t here,” he says honestly. “I’ve learned how to lose people.” His words catch in his throat as Dean lowers Sam’s hand back to his leg, braces his own on top of it. “But not you. Never you.”

There’s a brief swell of resentment that surges through his brother then, locks his muscles stiff until he can swallow the anger back down. A bitter tension that Sam recognizes from the last few days. Something to do with Cas. But it passes again nearly as quickly as it came on. “We’re free,” Dean says instead. Back to being the man that he needs right now. All gentle strength and protection. “God’s left the building, just like you said. All our choices are _ours _now. Every single one of ‘em.” He lets out a shade of a laugh, but it’s authentic this time. There’s relief woven through his voice. “And you know what I wanna do with my first real choice in my whole life?”

And there _is _comfort in that realization—that their life is _theirs _now. A filament of peace that slices through the horror and misery of the day. “What?” Sam asks.

Dean reaches up to slide his free hand around the back of Sam’s head, those clear green eyes fixed steadily on his own until the very last second that he pushes forward on his heels to kiss him.

Sam surrenders immediately. Dean’s blunt fingers carding through his hair, the catch of stubble against his lips as he opens his mouth wider, the solid weight of Dean’s shoulders under his own questing hands. Sam’s rock, forever and always. His home. His everything.

Dean presses into him until he can get a knee onto the bed. Until he can get his arms around Sam secure enough to tip him back, to hold him up, to forgive him one more monstrous act. Just like always. And Sam loses himself in the feel of Dean all around him. Just like always.

His brother is the one to break the kiss, eventually. “Your turn,” he whispers against Sam’s lips, only pulling back just enough to speak. “It’s a new world. First real choice, what’s it gonna be?”

But Sam’s already made his. His first real choice was to plunge a dagger into Rowena’s belly. To hold a woman against him in a sick parody of intimacy until she bled out all over her own hands. Turns out that Chuck hadn’t been the one writing him as a killer after all—_that was all Sam_.

But Dean’s a killer too. The only one tainted enough to love Sam’s darkness, as well as his light. The same way he’s loved in return.

“_You_,” Sam says truthfully, and he’s the one who kisses Dean this time, gliding his fingers over the back of his brother’s neck to hold him in place as he devours him, teeth and tongue and teeth again. Dean twitches his head a little, probably because the light tickle against the shorn hair at his nape is irritating, but so stupidly touch-starved that he’ll always take whatever Sam is willing to give him. As he opens up and lets Sam take everything he needs.

Because Dean _had _been his very first choice, back in that crypt, with Rowena knowingly throwing his twisted desires blunt in his face and daring him to choose any different. He’ll be his second choice too, _now_, with Dean rolling his knuckles against the bend of his hip. Tugging Sam’s v-neck down to twirl the tip of his tongue into the hollow of his throat. And he’ll be his last. When Sam is slipping into Dean’s bed after lights out in their shared retirement community, his brother so beautiful with his hair completely silver and his face lined with age, and Sam will be there when Dean takes his last, shaky breath and when he swallows two fistfuls of whatever medication he can find so that he doesn’t have to wake up one single morning without him.

Dean grips tight around his waist, and Sam tips his head back as a moan slips out.

_She’d ridden him on that small, wooden chair. Her slender wrists crossed behind his neck, her petite, elegant frame so light he could hold her up with just the strength of his arms. Hot and wet as she slowly sank onto him, the cooler silk of her dress pooled over their laps. Hiding their shared sin from view. An extra layer against the dark._

_He’d been so hard, **aching**—so desperate for touch, for connection—but the expert sway of Rowena’s hips hadn’t scratched the itch the way he’d needed it to. Sam had tried harder, slammed his eyes shut and gripped at her back through the sequined fabric. Her delicate shoulder blades shifting under his hands like birds’ bones._

_But she’d known. She’d known exactly what he’d needed. And Sam still isn’t sure how deep the magic ran in her veins._

_“He’ll be okay,” she’d whispered into the shell of his ear. Gently bit at his lobe, worried at it softly with her tongue and her teeth. “We’re all here to help.” She didn’t even have to say his name for Sam to understand her completely. For the need and arousal to course through him, so much stronger than it had earlier. “You know a man like Dean doesn’t stay down for long. A warrior like that?” Sam had tried to stifle the needy, broken sound he’d made deep in his throat, but she’d heard it, and she went on. Emboldened. “No need to fret,” Rowena had said, her words even more alluring under the rolling lilt of her soft accent. “Before you know it, it’ll be you and big brother—together, just like **this**.”_

_Sam had choked on his own tongue. _

_He’d tried to hold still, to buck her off, the conflicting terror unable to disguise the way hips had savagely thrust up into her. Helpless and animal-instinctual. The sound she’d made in return. Pleased enough at the show of dominance to plaster herself against his chest._

_Rowena had wrapped herself around him even further, holding him in place as her arms twined around him like enchanted, thorny vines. “Tell me, Samuel,” she’d cooed, a macabre sort of lust layered under the curiosity. “Does he fuck you? Or is it the other way round?”_

_“Dean and I, we don’t—” Sam had tried, his breath panting through his chest as the fear had turned his blood to ice. “He’s my brother. That’s not—”_

_But she’d just let out an amused scoff. “Do you take me for an actual fool?” Rowena had asked. Teased, more like. There’d been no judgment in her tone, past the lingering humor. Just interest—arousal, even. And Sam had accepted it like the desperate man he was. His guilt evident in his own silence._

_She’d moaned and panted as he’d wordlessly thrust up into her, whispering filth into his ears the entire time. Clenching tight and wet around his cock. Observations and assumptions about Dean, the more obscene the better—the same way Ruby had. Only, this time it was sincere, and she didn’t want to hurt him and Sam could trust her._

Dean unbuttoning his jeans is what drags Sam back to reality. He swallows audibly, but it only takes a second before he’s helping his brother drag the rough denim down his legs.

They haven’t had sex in weeks. Not since…Jack. Not since _Mary_.

He’d have thought that after Rowena—after the blood and the death, he wouldn’t be able to want anything, any_one_. But when Dean presses a kiss to the inside of his bare ankle, Sam’s dick throbs hot and insistent in his boxer-briefs. He wants nothing more than to bury himself in his brother’s embrace. To hide from all the violent ugliness he’s witnessed and done by distracting himself with Dean’s hands and mouth and body. To sink underneath the way he loves him and not come up for air again for a few hours. Sam wonders how immoral that makes him. How well and truly fucked-up.

But Dean doesn’t even need him to ask before he’s slipping his hands underneath Sam’s open overshirt, sliding over his shoulders until the fabric comes free enough to toss out of the way. He settles back down between Sam’s knees, yanking him to the edge of the bed and guiding his legs around his waist, reaching for his v-neck next—but Sam stops him with a single hand over his own. His gunshot wound hasn’t gotten any better, and he doesn’t want Dean’s tendency for worrying to distract from the moment.

Thankfully, Dean’s used to Sam’s sudden and mercurial hang-ups, and he obeys the silent request without comment.

He reaches down to where Sam’s visibly aching instead, freeing the tip of his erection from where it’s trapped in his shorts. Sam lets out a strangled sound at the feel of his brother’s calloused palm around his length. As he grows fully hard in Dean’s hands. And then Dean descends onto him, soft, wet heat of his mouth sucking him down to the root, without even undressing him the rest of the way.

Sam jolts at the unexpected sensation, but Dean just swallows around him, his tongue pulsing somewhere along the underside of Sam’s dick, as he grips at his ass. The back of his thigh. His balls are still caught in the soft stretch of the tight fabric beneath and he lets out a wrecked noise as Dean pulls back just enough to breathe and then takes him all the way again. Sam chokes on air, clamping his legs around his brother’s sides as he blows him, but Dean barely even notices. A man fully devoted to his mission.

He can’t find a place to put his hands, fumbling and clutching at Dean’s shirt, his shoulders, the back of his neck. Lost in the wet slide of his gorgeous fucking mouth around Sam’s throbbing cock. His grief and his need warring electric under his skin. He cradles the side of Dean’s face, feeling himself through his brother’s cheek as he fucks up _hard _into his mouth and Dean holds his breath and palms at Sam’s balls just forceful enough to drop his orgasm out from underneath him and Sam comes down his brother’s throat with a strangled cry.

He pants for breath in the eternity between one blink and the next.

Sam remains curled over Dean’s body in the aftermath, hands cupping the back of his head as he slowly pulls away enough for Sam’s dick to slip out of his mouth. Spent and heavy. Sam lets out another hitched breath from deep in his chest, a weak sound of protest, as he reaches down to fumble for Dean’s fly.

But Dean just shakes his head. “It’s okay,” he says, voice hoarse and fucked-out, “I’m good.” Sam ignores him, getting his fingers fully tangled in Dean’s belt loops before his brother physically presses him back. “I’m good,” he says again. And it isn’t until Dean tips his face down to press a kiss to the top of his head that Sam finally lets it go.

“You sure?” he asks quietly.

Dean presses another kiss to the side of his head, to his lips, bringing his hands up to cradle his jaw, and Sam can taste himself on his brother’s tongue. He drags his own trail of kisses over his sharp cheekbone, down his throat, pressing his face into his neck with a quiet groan, unable to bear even an inch of space between them. But Sam also lets Dean fuss over him as he tucks him back inside his boxers. As he wordlessly guides him back to the bed, innocently, this time. As he tugs the thin blanket up over his hips, like he used to, so many years ago in so many motel rooms.

_Rowena had paused at the doorway afterwards—after all her garments were back in place and no passersby in the halls would be any the wiser—twisting around just enough to whisper the lights back on. Like she’d almost forgotten. Her lipstick pristine and perfect under the ancient electrical whine, the dim-gold flicker of illumination. They’d never kissed. _

_“You really should take a break,” she’d said to him, not unkindly as far as parting words went. “…I’ll get your mother to make you some tea.” _

_And there had been something reassuring in that. Something familiar. The caretaking one step removed. Sam’s not sure what he would have done if she’d offered to do it herself._

_“Rowena,” he’d started, more self-conscious than he’d had any right to be after what had just happened. Though he’d looked far more disheveled than she had. Not that anyone would take it as anything out of the ordinary, given the way he’d been presenting himself these past few weeks. “About me and Dean…”_

_But she’d just laughed, without a hint of cruelty in it. As if she was simply amused by his modesty. “Don’t you worry, Samuel. It’ll be our little secret,” Rowena had assured him with a lascivious wink that was anything **but **modest. Then she’d tossed a sidelong glance over to the soiled and torn papers strewn out over the table. “As will **this**, I’m sure? I do have a reputation to keep, after all.”_

_Sam had mustered a faint huff of amusement at the requisite joke, even if he hadn’t felt it past the polite expectation. It had been such an odd moment of realization. Because despite the weird way they’d all grown to care for each other, there weren’t any deeper **feelings **between them. A casual relationship in every sense of the word. Especially because—apart from a few, tentative comments about maybe being interested in that kind of thing—it’s something Sam had never managed to hold onto cleanly. Never quite able to separate sex from emotion the way his brother could._

_There had been something immeasurably freeing about it, though, once he’d been able to look it square in the face like that. The knowledge that neither he nor Rowena would ever be hurt by it—if it continued until they found Dean, or even if it never happened again. The both of them getting exactly what they needed from the arrangement, and nothing more. An equivalent exchange. No romantic attachments at all, except for an underlying fondness and trust. …And understanding._

_He’d smiled at the back of her head, as the long red waves had glided off down the hallway. Even though she couldn’t see it. The first genuine smile, thin as it was, that he’d allowed himself since Michael had torn his heart out of his chest and flown away with it. Disappearing into the dark and three-thousand miles of lonely country._

Sam looks out over his room without really seeing much of anything, curled up on the right side of his bed, staring at the couple of shirts hanging on his wall that still have a day’s wear in them. The ladder of files so neatly organized on his desk, everything in its proper place. Dean sitting at the edge of the bed, his lower back resting against Sam’s shins as he distractedly pets a hand over what he can reach.

His brother lets out a subtle sigh as he brushes a thumb over the arch of Sam’s eyebrow, barely audible over the hum of the bunker’s magical wiring. His intent is practically hanging in the air though. Sam knows that he wants to ask if he’s feeling any better now. But he also knows that Dean doesn’t have to in order to see that he really isn’t.

Sam leans into his brother’s touch anyways, soaking up every bit of the rare affection he can. “Do you remember after I slept with Piper?” he asks after a moment, maybe just to break the silence.

“Who?”

His lips twitch at his brother’s shit memory. He probably should have expected that. “The waitress from the diner in Twin Falls?”

Dean scrunches his face up a little as he tries to recall. It’s almost comical, if anything could be right now. “The blonde?”

“Yeah.” Sam stares at the comforting familiarity of his bedroom walls, shoving aside the subcutaneous thrum of how novel it is to even _have _familiar bedroom walls. He pulls in and lets out a breath, not even sure where what he was planning on going with this. “I don’t really like one night stands all that much,” he admits, eventually. Sheepishly.

It’s incredible, really, that even with everything else going on, Dean manages to drum up a weak chuckle. “I know, sweetheart.”

“And after Piper—” Sam cuts himself off, then decides on a different approach. Dean clearly doesn’t really remember the details anyway. “We were in the car later that night,” he says, “and I mentioned that the only way I’d be interested in someone other than you would be something casual. Something more than one night, but not actually a relationship.” He fights back the niggling, contradictory need to apologize for doing what Dean does shamelessly all the time. Then fails. No matter how open their relationship is, there’s a small part of him that always feels like he’s being unfaithful. “Because I don’t need that,” he adds, just to be safe, “obviously.” He digs his fingernails into his palm, then forces himself to stop being a coward, steering right into the painful truth. “And because I thought it would be easier,” he confesses. “I thought if I didn’t love her, then it wouldn’t hurt…” _…when she died._

Because that was the only way it was going to end, wasn’t it? No matter who it was, no matter the situation. Every person Sam touches turns to ash in his hands. Everyone but Dean—and he’d willingly make that trade-off over and over again. Sam would happily let hundreds, _thousands _die in exchange for his brother, and the truth of that sickens him deep to his core.

Just not enough to do anything about it.

“And how’s that plan working out for you?” Dean asks, just enough humor in it to soften the genuine question. Just enough sincerity in it to prove that he actually cares about the answer.

Sam lets out a huff through his nose, all bitter irony. “Not great, honestly.”

Dean lightly grazes the back of his knuckles down the length of his neck. Understanding and sympathy in a simple gesture.

He’d known though. There’s no excuse for him. Sam had known that Rowena’s death would be at his hand for _years _now, and he’d slept with her anyway. The bottomless well of his guilt won’t ever let him forget that. “It’s still my fault,” he says.

The abrupt wall of stone that slams down over Dean’s eyes is surprisingly unsettling. “It’s _Cas’s _fault,” he grits through his tensed jaw.

Sam hesitates in uncertainty. “No, it isn’t.”

“Yes,” Dean says grimly, without any room for argument, “it is.” And Sam is taken aback a little by the fierceness of it. The sharp-edged granite buried under the softer caring of the last hour. “Cas is the reason that Rowena’s dead. The reason _you’re _hurting right now.” He clenches his fist in the covers at Sam’s waist, like that second example is a much deeper betrayal than the first. “You didn’t have a choice, you only did what you had to. He’s the one that went off-script. Killed Belphegor, right in the middle of the fucking plan.”

“Dean, he was evil.”

“Of _course _he was evil,” Dean snaps in frustration, like it’s been building this entire time. “He was a _demon_. He was lying through his teeth every other word he spoke to us. I never trusted him for a goddamn second, and I know you didn’t either.” And Sam can’t argue that point. It’s true. They’ve been getting into bed with devils for years, and they each know exactly what it entails. Dean twists his head to glare at the wall instead of Sam—trying to protect him, maybe, from any misplaced hostility. “We always do what needs to be done to make sure that everybody’s safe, and _then _we deal with the consequences afterwards. Cas doesn’t get to call an audible in the middle of a mission that gets our allies—” he pauses for a moment, out of respect for Rowena’s sacrifice, or Sam’s pain, “that gets the people we _care _about dead. And there’s a reason for that,” Dean adds bitterly. “He’s always had shitty judgment. This isn’t even close to the first time he’s fucked things up this bad.”

True or not, they can’t afford much more infighting right now. Not after all they’ve lost. “Dean, he’s an angel,” Sam interrupts him quietly. “Even if he’s upstairs, he can still hear you if he wants to.” A weak defense, he’ll admit, but it’s probably the only one Dean will listen to right now.

And, thankfully, his brother caves just like he knew he would. “How’s your shoulder?” he asks instead, changing the subject to one that puts _Sam _in the hot seat. Probably on purpose.

“Why,” Sam deflects instead of answering truthfully, “you gonna kiss it better?”

Dean’s mouth quirks up for a brief second, but the crinkles around his eyes linger even as his smile drops away again. “Hey man, all you gotta do is ask,” he says, leaning down to press his lips to Sam’s shoulder through his t-shirt, carefully above the wound, not on it. Then he nudges back just enough to meet his gaze. “I need a drink, or three.” Dean tilts his head at the door, exhaustion in his eyes. “You?”

Sam just shakes his head against his pillow. “I’m good,” he says, and Dean strokes a hand over his hair like he isn’t surprised by the decision. Sam brings his own fingers up to tangle with his brother’s. “You can come back though,” he adds, a little too eager to feign nonchalance, “after. If you want.” He wets his lips, nervous, even though he knows Dean won’t turn him down. “We need sleep, man. Both of us.”

“Probably sleep better in our own beds,” Dean teases gently.

“That isn’t true and you know it.”

He snorts at the unassailable comeback, knowing when he’s well and truly lost. “I’ll be right back,” Dean promises, without a word of complaint about Sam’s mattress being too hard or uncomfortable. “Get some sleep.”

“I will,” Sam says decidedly. “When you get back.”

Dean nods his head in defeat, then drops his hands back to his own knees so he can stand.

He pauses at the doorway, so much taller than Rowena had been, twisting around just enough to toss Sam a lingering look of concern before he finally slips out into the hallway. He leaves the lights on behind him. The ancient electrical whine, the dim-gold flicker of illumination chasing after his swollen, kiss-bruised lips.

Sam smiles at the back of Dean’s head—thin, but genuine. Even if he can’t see it. The first one he’s allowed himself since Rowena had curled her own fingers around his and asked him to choose his brother.

And Sam had made the same choice he always will.

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from The Eagles’ “Witchy Woman”.


End file.
